Ingram Micro Execs Discuss Consolidation, Partners, More

At the recent Global Technology Distribution Council (CTDC) Summit, where distributors discussed the latest industry trends and developments, Channel Partners caught up with Ingram Micro executives Paul Bay, executive vice president and group president for the Americas, and Kirk Robinson, senior vice president, Go to Market.

Bay and Robinson discussed some industry trends and the impact on both the distribution community and partners.

Ingram Micro’s Paul Bay

Channel Partners: When it comes to telecom, what’s Ingram’s relationship with telecom companies and what telecom offerings are in the Ingram portfolio?

Paul Bay: Ingram Micro has such a vast offering of products and services, and we touch a majority of telecoms on a global basis, and a lot of time that’s through our cloud platform. We’ve been very inquisitive and active in acquiring technology on our cloud platform such as Ensim and … Odin, now called the Ingram Micro platform, and we sell through many telecoms — meaning they buy our cloud offering that goes through them as a telecom and out to the end user.

We’re solving a need for the end user because we have the capability to do that. I think the telecoms, they’re looking at – what do they want to be too – so as they expand their services and offerings, do they become a different customer to us?

That comes back to, who are our customers of the future and where are [we headed]?

We’re active on the telecom front in a number of ways, which varies somewhat by – I’ll call it geographic location – because of the skill sets at some of the telecom companies. That’s an area we weren’t in just a few years ago, but because of our activity in cloud and that consumption model, we’re very active there.

CP: Would you be more specific about how Ingram is active with telecoms?

PB: We’re providing services and solutions that are being delivered through our cloud platform through telecom agents out to the end user.

Ingram Micro’s Kirk Robinson

Kirk Robinson: We also made an acquisition of Bright Point about five years ago, and that put us in a different position where one out of every three handsets in the U.S. was touched by Bright Point, and their full life-cycle service on the handset, that’s working with all the major carriers, imaging, asset tagging, recycling, refurbishing, from the mobility side. So that’s a bit different angle when you say telecom, but still within that world of mobility.

CP: What do you want partners to know about Ingram bringing in new technologies that will help them move their businesses forward?

PB: They should continue to look at Ingram Micro as an opportunity regarding some of the new technologies that are coming to market. We have an emerging vendors initiative within our company to make sure that we …

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